ISO 3166-2:GB
entry for the United Kingdom in ISO 3166-2
ISO 3166-2:GB is the entry for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (GBNI) in ISO 3166-2, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which defines codes for the names of the principal divisions and subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1. The codes and structures for the United Kingdom (UK) are provided to the ISO in Geneva by the British Standards (BS) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Primary divisions
Currently for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, ISO 3166-2 codes are defined for the following primary divisions and subdivisions:
Three countries and one province, as follows:
England
25 two-tier counties, 36 metropolitan districts, 58 unitary authorities, 32 London boroughs, and one city corporation
As of August 2025, the standard has codes for the divisions in place until 31 March 2023. On 1 April 2023, the non-metropolitan county of Cumbria was abolished and replaced by two unitary authorities (Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness), as well as the non-metropolitan counties of North Yorkshire and Somerset became unitary authorities, which as of August 2025 are not reflected in ISO 3166-2.
Northern Ireland
11 districts
Scotland
32 council areas
Wales
22 unitary authorities
Each ISO 3166-2:GB code consists of two parts; both parts are in upper-case capital letters, and are separated by a hyphen (without spaces). The first part for the is GB, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The second part is three letters, which is the British Standard BS 6879 three-letter code of the individual subdivision.
Though GB is the United Kingdom's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, UK is exceptionally reserved for the United Kingdom on the request of the country (United Kingdom). Its main usage is the .uk internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) and, on 28 September 2021, UK replaced GB as the official country code on motor vehicle registration plates.
Current codes
Subdivision names are listed as in the ISO 3166-2 standard, as published by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA).
The public source identifies “ISO 3166-2:GB” as entry for the United Kingdom in ISO 3166-2. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around 3166-2, entry and United.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27818. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2023 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “ISO 3166-2:GB” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.